On Saturday night, Loyola University Chicago hosted its annual Founders' Dinner, an event that drew some 850 guests for an evening of cocktails, music, dancing, and award presentations. Richard Williams, the university's director of special events, wanted the happening to take place on campus, a challenge since there is no on-campus ballroom that can accommodate such a sizable crowd. So, as he has done for the past few years, Williams hired a crew of vendors to transform the school's gymnasium into a temporary ballroom.
The dinner used to take place in a hotel ballroom, but that venue, according to Williams, didn't underscore the evening's school-centric theme. The event is "all about Loyola—it's very rah, rah, rah," Williams said. "The most important thing we do is have this dinner on campus. You just can't buy that type of significance when it comes to alumni. We had one guy who hadn't been back on campus for 40 years."
When he first brought the dinner back to campus four years ago, Williams looked at ways to "transform the gym into a ballroom without spending a king's ransom." His first step: investing in a few pieces that could be used at the annual dinner as well as throughout the year at various other university events.
"The staging gets reused, the carpets get reused, the chairs and tables get used considerably, and the platforms get used all the time," said Williams. "So everything gets repurposed, and we can keep the [Founders' Dinner] more affordable than it would be if we had to rent everything year after year."
The university also has its own security crew and fleet of golf carts, which Williams used to transport guests from a cocktail reception in the school's new library to dinner in the gym. To be extra financially conservative this year, Williams shaved 30 percent off his typical lighting costs. "My lighting designer said to me: 'As long as you understand what we're doing, I know what you like,'" Williams said. "But this year I really wanted to show that I was being fiscally responsible."
In another cost-cutting measure, Williams got rid of the supper-club-style tiered seating of the past several years, which he said "Was expensive, but people went absolutely crazy for it. Of course, I realized guests were going to walk into the room and immediately go 'Where are the platforms?' So I thought, 'We've got to make the room look so different they will completely forget we ever had platforms.'" Toward that end, the event received a new ceiling treatment and a drastically different seating plan, with long communal tables set across the gym floor.
"And thank God," said Williams, "not a single person said anything [about the new seating arrangement]."
